


The Mideel Patient

by vinnie2757



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Explicit Language, F/M, Major Character Injury, Non-Graphic Violence, Slow Burn, Wutai War (Compilation of FFVII), cid has a spinal injury, war era au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28636251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: After getting shot down in the line of duty, Captain Cid Highwind is shipped as a matter of emergency to the clinic at Mideel, to be cared for by Dr Crescent, the best in the business.Badly injured, and in desperate need of a decent cup of tea, Cid finds himself being cared for by the dolly daydreamer that is the doctor's daughter, Shera. Who, Cid finds, has a brain on her that may have just saved his life.
Relationships: Cid Highwind/Shera
Kudos: 5





	The Mideel Patient

**Author's Note:**

> It's lockdown part three, that means another au to distract from the unending horror that 2021 is already becoming.
> 
> Warning for injuries and hospital-related care. Shera is not medically qualified but she does her best.
> 
> Enjoy, my lovelies~!

The storm had been threatening all day, and it only seems right that it breaks after dinner, while Shera’s in the bath. It had been a long day of travelling, lots of biting her tongue against gossip on the train and her own niggling doubts, and she’s exhausted. A headache behind her eyes that only gets worse when she takes her glasses off when she gets in the bath, and a tension between her shoulders that she hopes the hot water will help. She needs to sleep, she knows this, but she’s overfilled the tub and knows she’ll drown if she falls asleep here, so instead she braces her feet against the lip and stares at her knees, scarred red from old scrapes, poking through the water and the bubbles.

It’s nice, though, being home. She doesn’t know why she came, not really. She’d been given leave, because she was overdue, and she never normally comes home, just stays in Midgar and takes the time to pretend like there isn’t a war on, like there aren’t propaganda advertisements across the walls, in the stations, in every snap frame available. She looks at the chocobos and the clothes she can’t afford and eats something not the canteen meals from a café in Sector 5, and she pretends like the weeping, grieving widows she sees, she pretends like she’s not helping their husbands die.

She’d been under no illusions about what working for ShinRa would entail, Palmer had laid it all out for her when he came that summer’s morning, hyped up on his own importance, singing her praises as he’d talked about how great it would be to have a Crescent in R&D instead of over in the science department, how she showed such talent, such initiative, such drive, and how impressive that was for someone who hadn’t had a day’s training from the Institute of Technology. He talked about how she was one of the most impressive engineers he’d ever seen, and how valuable her work on the aircraft already was for the war effort. She’d been nineteen, just about, and she’d felt lost, confused. Not really known what to do with herself, and that had been purpose, direction.

And then she heard the truth of the war, the real figures, and then it had been too late. All she could do was try to improve things enough to end the war sooner. Not because she wanted ShinRa to win, but because she didn’t want anyone else to die.

Eight years and it’s still going.

So she took her leave when it was offered to her and she came home, and she lies in the bath now, listens to the storm outside, the rattle of the rain against the roof, the windows, the uneven drumming of it a salve on her heart. She’s missed storms, the rain in its most organic state. Midgar is a wonder, a technological marvel, and she’s fascinated with it, but it’s not real, not home.

Mideel is home, with its log cabins and its hot springs and the creak of the wood as it settles beneath their feet.

Her parents had been glad to see her, and she drums her fingers against the bubbles, the water, watches it splash. A cup of tea later, and it was like she’d never been gone; her mother had enlisted her in helping with laundry and preparing dinner, telling her all about how busy the clinic had been. There’s been a lull lately, in soldiers coming for treatment, and Shera wonders if that means her designs are working, or if there just aren’t enough soldiers left. Daniel had come home from the clinic, looking tired, worn out around the edges, but perked up at the sight of his daughter, clasping her hands in his and his grip had been as tight as she remembered it.

Eight years and she’d barely come home at all.

She can hear them now, chatting away to each other as they clear up from dinner. Shera’s missed her mother’s cooking. Hersilia had given her a folder full of recipes, but Shera has no mind for cooking, not really. She’s too easily distracted and besides, there was neither time nor money to cook at the Institute. If it wasn’t from the canteen, it was from a carton, and she feels the ache in her joints for the poor diet. Her mother had told her she was too thin, but Shera had always been a gangly washboard of a girl, all knees and elbows and no curve.

Her eyes are heavy, which is a sign she needs to get washed and out of the tub, so she sets about doing that. She’s eaten, and she’s clean, so she can go to bed, and in the morning, she’ll no doubt get dragged to the clinic to help out. As she roots through the water to find the washcloth, she finds that she’s missed that, too, like most of the things about being home.

Some of the engineers talked about how glad they were to be away from home, about how much they didn’t want to go back, and none of them could seem to understand how Shera wasn’t full of resentment and relief and freedom. ShinRa was just as much as cage as anything they talked about.

She’s rinsing her hair when the door knocks, and she nearly brains herself on the edge of the tub.

‘Who could that be?’ she hears her mother asking as she passes on her way to the door.

Shera focuses on getting herself dry and in her robe, and leaves the bathroom working a towel through her hair, frowning at the sight on the doorstep.

Her mother, hands on her hips, a nurse, soaked to the bone, standing on the mat.

‘I’m so sorry to interrupt,’ the nurse is saying, ‘it’s just, they’ve brought someone to the clinic, matter of emergency. Straight in from Wutai, they said.’

Shera’s stomach turns over, and she freezes, stares at the nurse. The nurse is wringing her hands, looking at Hersilia with the creased brow of someone too scared to know what to do.

‘I’ll get Daniel,’ Hersilia says, and rushes off to do that.

Within a minute, Shera is following her parents out into the storm, barefoot and in her bathrobe, across town and across the bridge to the clinic, where all the lights are on and some soldiers are skulking. Third Class, by the colour of their uniforms, and they all scurry out of the way of the good doctor.

The smell in the clinic is incredible, and Shera covers her mouth for a moment before she adjusts. It’s not the first time she’s smelled burnt skin, and she’s sure it won’t be the last.

‘Oh, _Planet_ ,’ her father sighs, and then tells the nurse she might as well send the troop on their way after she’s checked them over.

The nurse nods and off she goes, offering half a smile to Shera as she passes.

‘Daniel,’ Hersilia says, quietly, and Shera can only half see the body in the gurney between their arms.

The half is enough.

‘Sometimes I wonder what they’re doing out there,’ he sighs, and reaches for his stethoscope., hooked over the arms of an IV stand. ‘We’d best get him cleaned up; else we’ll get nowhere fast.’

Hersilia turns to get an apron and gloves from the boxes on the side, and startles at the sight of her daughter.

‘Shera,’ she admonishes, because Shera is barefoot and soaked through in an oversized bathrobe with sodden hair hanging down her neck, her glasses steaming.

‘I want to help,’ she says, and Hersilia eyes her for a second.

‘Get an apron, then.’

Armed with an apron, gloves and a pair of scissors, she rounds the gurney to where the body lies and takes a moment to study it. She’d be stupid to not recognise the body, the face, and she wonders what it means that Cid Highwind managed to get shot down.

He’s unconscious, because of course he would be, given that one of his legs is facing the wrong way and there’s a gash across his face several inches wide and just as many deep. Beneath the dirt, he’s probably quite handsome, she knows his hair is blond and his eyes blue, but he stinks of burnt fuel and skin and hair, and he’s soaked in blood and mud and – and –

‘Shera,’ Hersilia barks, and Shera draws a breath, comes back to herself.

‘Yes, yes,’ she nods, and turns her attention to cutting the uniform away from his skin.

It sticks in places, and she’s not really properly trained, not in any official capacity, because growing up around the clinic, and helping out in her teens doesn’t really count, but here she is, slowly cutting away burnt and torn fabric, and picking it out of gaping wounds.

Between them, they get him stripped and cleaned, and Shera supposes, as she peels the bloody, stinking gloves off to throw them in the bin, that she might as well have waited to have a bath.

Dr Crescent’s worked around them, hooking up equipment to the Captain so that they can get a read on his vitals. He’s reset the leg, stitched up his face, and there’s almost a grown man beneath the bandages.

‘He’s alright,’ Dr Crescent says, and they listen for a moment to the sound of the oxygen tank. ‘Well, he will be if he makes it through the night.’

Shera rubs her eyes with the edge of her thumb and settles her glasses over her nose.

‘I’ll stay,’ she says.

Dr Crescent looks at her.

‘Dearest,’ he says, gentle, ‘you need to rest, it’s been a long day.’

‘It’s fine,’ she says, even though she has no idea why she said it. ‘I don’t mind.’

She looks at the Captain lying there on the gurney, bleeding through the bandages with his leg splinted at an angle that looks bad for his hip, and he looks – small. He’d looked big on the posters, when they’d shown them more. A big grin, and bright eyes. Wild, almost. Something untamed about him that lent itself well to this golden boy of the air force image ShinRa had cultivated for him. He was larger than life, in a way none of the SOLDIERs ever really managed to capture. Maybe because he wasn’t anything special, so he would declare on the rare occasions the propaganda vultures – journalists, journalists, some of them probably had integrity – managed to get a hold of him. He was just a kid from the mountains up in Deist and he was – quote – fucking good at his job.

Shera feels something twist in her gut. Her father is running through the equipment with her, telling her what to look for, what to call him for, what to do, and it rushes over her in a wave, so caught up in the rolling guilt threatening to make her vomit. If the best pilot in ShinRa – and if they admitted that, that means he’s _better_ than the best – managed to get shot down, then it must have been some fault in her design, some upgrade she’d signed off that hadn’t been just that. Something _she did_ caused the sight before her.

‘I understand,’ she says, just to get him to stop talking, and then, ‘are there tea bags in the office?’

* * *

It’s the damnedest thing. He didn’t expect to be woken in the woken in the middle of the night, but a particularly loud thundercrack rattles the windows and it startles him. He expects to be in his plane, but he’s not, and it takes him a moment to remember why.

He’s in pain, and keeping his eyes open hurts, so he doesn’t.

Before he closes them, in the dim light of the room he’s in, with its soft beeping and ticking and whistling of machinery, he sees a girl cross the end of his bed – bed – gurney. It’s a fucking gurney and he knows it. She’s only in a bathrobe, and her hair’s pulled into a ponytail. He can’t place the image, in contrast to the rest of the room.

So he lets his eyes close and he goes back to sleep.

* * *

He dreams of a girl in a bathrobe, and he doesn’t know why. He’s never seen a girl in a bathrobe – well.

No. That’s not strictly true. He has, obviously, seen girls in bathrobes, he’s been around girls and he knows what they look like.

This particular girl – he doesn’t recognise her. But he dreams about her anyway. The soft line of her neck disappearing behind the loose curve of the towelling, the swish of her ponytail as she turns her head, the auburn of the locks falling over her shoulder. She wears glasses, big round things that cover half her face even though he’s sure they aren’t thick lenses, and she’s – she’s pretty.

She’s not beautiful, but she is pretty. She’s smiling at him, and he knows, in that second, as her tongue pokes between her teeth and she says his name in a voice he can’t hear, that he’s in love with her. That he’s married her.

This is their honeymoon, and he’s lying in their bed watching her potter about making tea, because that’s – of course his wife would make tea, because he drinks tea, and this is a dream, so a wife making him tea, that’s a sensible thing for her to do.

‘Come away from the window,’ he says, and she turns her back to it to look at him, eyebrow raised.

‘The war’s over, Captain,’ she tells him, even though he can’t hear her, and he tries to tell her that it’s not.

He does, he opens his mouth, and half of a refusal makes it onto his teeth, but the knife is already jutting between her ribs, and the white of her robe is turning red, and he doesn’t know what else to say.

* * *

Another dream, and it’s just fire. The burning, screaming heat of the plane as it goes down, the crash, the weight of the engine as the plane crumples in on itself, pins his legs. The weight of his own skull, pressing against his face as he bounces it off the edge of the console, the force of the impact nearly ripping him from his harness.

He hears movement, but can’t find his gun. He scrabbles through the blood and the flames and the charred remains of his uniform, but he can’t find it. A voice, calling his name, a blade to his neck.

Nothing.

* * *

Cid wakes to the distant sound of business. Outside, somewhere, there’s movement, noise. People. But inside, wherever here is, it’s quiet. He can hear himself breathing, the tick of a clock. He’s aware, dimly, that he’s in pain, but he can’t tell where it is, or what hurts, or why. Just that it does, and that tells him he’s hurt bad. Real fucking bad.

He lies there for a few moments, silent, eyes shut, listening to his breathing and the ticking of the clock and slowly adjusting to the sensation of something on his face. A mask, he supposes. Oxygen.

The fuck happened?

He’d turned the plane back; one of the squad under fire, pinned in two directions and unable to get the lift to take a third. So he’d turned back and he’d – he’d –

‘Fuck,’ he grunts, and feels – feels –

He can’t feel his legs.

‘Oh!’ comes the exclamation from the foot of the bed, and then a clatter, a crash, a soft groan. ‘Great.’

It hurts to keep his eyes open, but he peels the lids up anyway and everything swims one way, the other, chooses a whole new way to go before he gives up and tries, in vain, to slam a hand across his face. He doesn’t get his arm more than a few inches off the mattress before warm fingers are taking his, holding it gently.

‘Don’t,’ says a girl’s voice – a woman’s, soft and low and unfamiliar. ‘Don’t, take it easy, Captain.’

‘Easy?’ he croaks, ‘easy? Fuck you think you are, givin’ me orders?’

At least, that’s what he tries to say, but it trails off into nothing after the first few words.

Fingers stroke the back of his hand, absently, he can tell, a gesture that means nothing to the person giving it because she’s not even aware she’s doing it and he gags.

‘Oh!’ she exclaims again, and there’s another clatter. The oxygen mask is eased from around his ears, off his mouth, and something cold is shoved under his cheek. ‘Just turn your head, Dad said not to move you.’

‘Fuck off,’ he grunts, and manages to open his eyes again.

This time the world only swims two ways before settling into something resembling coherency, and he can make out the girl with the voice so soft it’s like the wisps of smoke curling off the end of a cigarette. She’s pretty, he thinks, probably, but her hair’s a tangled mess tied into a ponytail, her glasses too big for her face, and she’s wearing a fucking bathrobe of all things.

‘I can’t,’ she tells him, and straightens up. She’s a slender thing, her collarbones sharp beneath the drape of her robe, her wrists delicate as she shuts off a monitor or two, twiddles the knobs of machinery until the buzzing leaves his ears. ‘Dad told me to stay with you until you woke, and then I’m to let him know, and he’ll come take a look.’

Cid watches her, and she blinks at him like a fucking idiot.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Fuck sake, Four-Eyes,’ he snorts, breathless, and lets his eyes close again, the weight of the pain in his face forcing him into the pillow. ‘Call him.’

Just let him get some more fucking painkillers so he can sleep it off.

‘Oh, right. Yes! Hang on, I’ll – I’ll make tea, while I’m in the office.’

‘Tea?’ he asks, but she’s already gone.

He hears her clattering about in another room, and he lies there, listens to the cadence of her voice as she talks, on the phone presumably. Everything hurts, and he tries to remember why. His plane was shot down, he knows that much. But why so much pain? He would have ejected, as soon as the engine got caught, and he remembers hammering on the switch for his seat, but it – it –

Something had jammed, and he’d been fucking trapped in there, and he – he –

He manages to turn his head to throw up, but it’s not a pleasant sensation, because there’s no strength in his arms to hold himself up, and everything feels like a dead weight from the gut down. He can’t turn his hips to get better purchase, and he clutches at the sheets.

He can’t feel his fucking legs.

‘Hey,’ Four-Eyes says, gentle, her fingers warm at the nape of his neck, ‘hey, I’ll take that. I brought you water, and tea.’

‘Fuck off,’ he spits, literally, before she takes the bowl from him. ‘Just fuck off.’

‘Captain,’ she replies.

‘My legs.’

There’s a moment’s silence, and he peels his gaze up to find her frowning.

‘They’re intact, if that’s what you’re asking. They were badly broken, but they’re intact.’

‘Intact?’ he asks and turns his head to look.

They are, in fact, intact, he can see his feet poking out from beneath the thin sheet they’ve covered him with. They’re there, and he tries to wiggle his toes.

Nothing moves, there isn’t even a twitch.

‘I can’t feel them,’ he breathes, and Four-Eyes touches his arm.

‘Dad’s on his way,’ she says.

Dad turns out to be a man who introduces himself as Dr Crescent; an older man, with grey at the temples and the same wide round glasses as his daughter, and just as lanky in the shoulders. He’s smartly dressed, but haggard, like he’s been up all night. Liaising, Cid supposes, to get him transferred back to somewhere not this – this –

‘Where am I?’ Cid asks, instead of responding to the greeting.

‘Mideel,’ Dr Crescent replies, ‘you were brought in last night as a matter of emergency, straight from the battlefield. I believe your plane was shot down.’

‘Mideel?’ Cid echoes.

That’s halfway around the fucking planet. Why the fuck would ShinRa send him here instead of fixing him up on the battlefield, or taking him to Midgar? It didn’t make any sense! A fucking Cure would have been fine, just to snap his bones back into place and he’d have been able to get another plane, get back on the field.

Why the fuck send him to Mideel?

‘Yes, Captain,’ Dr Crescent nods. ‘Mideel. There are worse places to recover, I’m sure, though I imagine this isn’t your ideal scenario.’

‘Dad,’ Four-Eyes says, quiet, in that same husky tone Cid has grown familiar with already, ‘he – he said he can’t feel his legs.’

Dr Crescent inhales and then exhales slowly. It’s not quite a sigh, but Cid feels something churn in his chest. His face hurts, his brain aches, his everything is – is – his legs are non-existent, even though they’re _right there_.

‘I can’t feel them,’ he says, helpfully.

He’d done his best to drink the tea Four-Eyes had made, but he couldn’t sit up, and she had dithered about helping him, repeating the assertation the doctor had told her not to move him, which made the whole tea thing fucking pointless, because what was he going to do, scald himself while he was at it?

‘Shera,’ the doctor says to his daughter, and Shera is a nice enough name, Cid thinks, one that suits her round mouth and soft nose, ‘go and get dressed, and wash your feet before you go in the house, your mother will have both our guts. Then sleep, please, you’ve been up too long.’

Here, he looks at Cid, who is holding a now-cold brew hopelessly, and the half-raise of the eyebrow tells him a lot about this four-eyed daughter of his.

‘I should stay,’ Shera says, ‘you’ll need help.’

‘I’ll have help,’ the doctor assures her, ‘your mother will be by soon for her rounds, and if not her, there are other nurses. Go and sleep, dearest.’

He kisses her forehead and sends her on her way, and they watch her go. When the door has swung shut behind her, Dr Crescent heaves a sigh, and turns back to Cid.

‘I’m not going to say that you’ll walk again, and I’m not going to say that you won’t,’ he says, ‘until I get a proper look at you, I won’t know what kind of damage your spine’s suffered, and even then, I can’t say for certain. Nobody can.’

‘Just throw a Cure on me and send me on my way,’ Cid says, and he tries to snap it out, but it sounds defeated to his own ears.

‘No, Captain, no. A Cure won’t heal you, not properly. No, you’ll have to heal the old-fashioned way, I’m afraid. I could talk you through the science of it, if you like, but you look about ready to pass out. Get some rest, Captain, you’re going to need it.’

* * *

He sleeps for another day or so, fits and spurts of wakefulness, filled with Shera pottering about around the gurney, sometimes on her own, sometimes with the Doctor, but she’s always there. Sometimes, he manages to wake without alerting her, and he watches her, standing at the window, or by the gurney, or at the door, wringing her hands and chewing on her lip and she looks – she looks scared.

He can never quite find the words to ask her why, and always slips back into sleep again.

When he wakes and feels something resembling awake, has something like a coherent thought in his head, the doc examines him more thoroughly, and Cid doesn’t need to hear it to see it on his face; he won’t be walking again.

They’ve got to get the broken bones healed first; can’t attempt to stand on broken legs, after all. So that’s their first port of call. Get the injuries they can see healed up and dealt with, and then they can work on his spine. The doctor still isn’t sure one way or the other, but Cid knows he won’t be walking.

He takes it on the chin, because he has to, he’s a fucking Captain, a soldier, he’s been fighting the fucking war for eight fucking years, he’ll be damned if he lets this show anything. His father would rise from his early grave to tan his fucking hide if he thought for a second Cid was giving the Highwind name a poor showing.

It’s a few hours later, when Shera comes back, because she always comes back, and helps her father get Cid into something vaguely resembling an upright position so that he can at least try and eat, that he begins to crack. She’s sat on the gurney next to him, in a soft-looking sweater and utilitarian trousers, white coat over her shoulders to – protect one of them, he supposes – and she carefully peels the bandages off his face.

‘It’s healing well,’ she says, ‘considering.’

His face has been aching like shit the entire time, in a way that painkillers haven’t touched, and when she traces the line from one temple across his forehead and into his eyebrow, down onto his cheekbone, he winces. No wonder.

‘It’s a good one,’ she says, and unscrews the tub in her lap, some potion or another she plans to dab into the cut, to help it heal, ‘but it should heal without too much of a scar. Maybe when you tan.’

She says it authoritatively, like she knows.

‘You know that for a fact?’ he asks.

‘Smashed my own face enough times over the years,’ she replies, ‘you only see the one on my nose when I’ve been in the sun too long.’

She doesn’t look like she’s ever been in the sun, and he goes cross-eyed looking at her.

‘You don’t look like you’ve ever seen the sun,’ he tells her, and she huffs out a laugh.

‘I suppose not,’ she smiles, gentle, and begins dabbing the potion into his temple, and she’s thorough, making sure she covers all of the sore, aching skin, even the cut itself, which makes him hiss, and then he chokes on a breath.

‘Captain?’ she asks.

‘I’m never going to fucking walk again,’ he chokes out, and she retreats enough to let him bury his face in his hands.

He doesn’t cry, because Cid Highwind is not a man that fucking cries. But he does sob his fucking guts out, so there’s that.

Shera sits with him the entire time, quiet, and looking at the instructions on the tub of potion, waiting him out. She doesn’t know what to say, and so she says nothing, and he finds that he respects that. Some part of him, still a child hiding behind his mother’s skirts to avoid a beating from his father, wants her to tell him it’ll be alright, but eight years of fucking war has taught him that not only will it not be alright, but that it’s stupid to think it’s possible.

Eventually, he runs out of energy, and Shera fetches him some tissues. Once he’s blown his nose, and she’s helped him change the catheter, because he supposes that’s a fucking thing he has to deal with now, she goes back to dabbing potion into his face. He thinks he likes that she doesn’t make a deal out of it, even though he’s sure she’ll tell her father when she goes home.

She smooths her finger around the edge of his eye, making him blink hard. It smears potion across his lashes, and it feels tingly, like mint. ‘I used to get a really brown tan, when I was younger,’ she offers, ‘but I’ve been working a lot lately, so I haven’t really had time to get out in the sun.’

Never mind that it’s winter, and cold, and the sun doesn’t really give them the time of day anymore. He can’t say anything; he’s got a farmer’s tan, though it’s more a pilot’s tan, in his case, forearms and face and collar, and the rest of him lily white beneath his uniform.

‘There,’ she says, and studies his face for a moment before getting to her feet. ‘I’ll get you some fresh bandages.’

‘And tea?’ he asks, and she glances back. Smiles.

‘And tea,’ she nods.


End file.
